I Am Waiting To Feel Certain

Everybody told her the same thing.

You will feel it. Something will happen when you hear the right one. It will be obvious. You will hear it and you will just know.

Six women said it, at different times, all of them kindly, none of them lying, all of them describing their own experience with complete honesty.

And she has read hundreds of names now. Hundreds. And nothing has happened. Not once. No lightning, no lift in the chest, no quiet certainty settling in like a bird.

So she has arrived at the only conclusion available, which is that something must be wrong with her.

I want to go after that conclusion, because it is false, and because it has been sitting on a woman for four months and has begun to grow into something much bigger than names.

Here is what has actually happened. A description of one common experience got repeated so often that it turned into a requirement. Six women reported weather. The seventh has been told she is failing to have weather.

And the thing is, none of them meant that. Not one of those six said, and if you do not feel it, you are doing this wrong. They were being warm. The requirement is something that got built in the hearing.

But it is built now, and it is load bearing, and it needs taking down.

The substance of things hoped for

There is a definition in Hebrews that is not talking about names and settles this completely.

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. (Hebrews 11:1, King James Version)

You are not required to feel your way to this, and Hebrews 11:1 has never once made a sensation the measure of anything. The Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on somebody who has been waiting for weather since May, and the written word puts substance and evidence where a person expects to find a feeling.

Read what that verse refuses to say. It does not say faith is the feeling of things hoped for. It says substance. It says evidence. Those are structural words. They are words about weight and about proof, and there is nothing atmospheric anywhere in the sentence.

And then the whole chapter that follows is a list of people who acted, at length, over years, mostly without any recorded sensation at all. Noah building in dry weather. Abraham going out not knowing. Sarah past the age. Not one of them is described as having felt certain.

You have been holding yourself to a standard that Hebrews 11 does not apply to a single person in it. The chapter records what they did and never once what they felt, and it is the Spirit of God who lifts a false requirement off a woman who has been failing at it faithfully.

What has actually been happening

Now let me say something that is going to be surprising, and it is a plain observation.

Something has been happening. It has simply not arrived in the form that was promised, so it has not been counted.

There is a name that keeps coming back. It has been off the list twice and it has returned both times. It gets typed into things. It is the one that gets said out loud when nobody is home. It has been present for weeks and it has been dismissed every single time, because it did not arrive with lightning.

That returning is data. It is much better data than a feeling, because a feeling on a Tuesday is a feeling on a Tuesday, and a name that has survived four months of being crossed off is something else entirely.

You are already holding the answer and have been discounting it for not being loud enough, and Scripture puts evidence and things not seen in the same line. Hebrews 11:1 calls quiet substance the real thing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been steadying something under the noise of the search.

Here is a way to test what I am saying, and it takes four seconds.

If somebody in the family announced tomorrow that they were using a particular name, which one would cause a small drop in the stomach.

Something answered that. Immediately. That is not indecision, and that is not a broken instrument. That is a person who knows and has been waiting for permission to know it in the wrong currency.

You were never broken, and no verse anywhere makes a feeling the proof of anything. The written word calls faith the evidence of things not seen, and the Spirit of God is what has been holding one name steady through four months of noise.

Why the feeling did not come

I want to say one more thing, because a woman in this position often quietly believes she is less attached than the six women who described the lightning.

That is worth answering directly.

Certainty rarely arrives before an act. It usually arrives after one. That is the order of nearly everything in Scripture and nearly everything in a life. Abraham went out and then knew. The ark got built and then the rain. The feeling that everybody described was frequently the feeling of a decision already made, remembered afterward as the moment it was made.

You are able to act before the feeling and let it follow, and Hebrews 11 records exactly that order in every single one of its examples. The Holy Spirit is what makes the going out possible before the knowing arrives, which is the whole shape of that chapter.

Which means the search has been running backwards. The plan was: wait for certainty, then choose. The order available is: say it out loud, live with it for a week, and let the certainty arrive on the far side of that, the way it arrives for almost everybody who ever describes it later.

You have not been given a defective instrument, and Scripture never once put the feeling first. The Holy Spirit is the one who supplies it in the doing rather than in the deciding, and Hebrews 11:1 makes substance the thing.